We have got used to services like Uber and Lyft (at least in cities that are not so anti-consumer as to ban them, I’m looking at you New York. Et vous Paris). But in most of the semiconductor world we are still stuck standing at the side of the road waving our hand helplessly in the hope that the light on that taxi is actually on. Leading… Read More
Tag: fabless
FD-SOI the Synapse Way
Last week I talked to Marco Brambilla of Synapse Design. Synapse is a design services company headquartered in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2003 by Satish Bagalkotkar and has been profitable since the beginning. Today it has over 700 people. In addition to the headquarters in Santa Clara, they have a software group in Colorado,… Read More
Design Virtualization Technology: VMWare for SoCs
It was way back in 2001 that Pat Gelsinger, then CTO of Intel, pointed out that if we kept increasing clock rates that chips would have the power density of rocket nozzles and nuclear reactor cores. Ever since then power has been public enemy #1 in chip design. In 2007 Apple announced the iPhone and the application processor inside … Read More
TSMC 10nm Readiness and 3DIC
At the TSMC Technology Symposium last month Suk Lee presented a lot of information on design enablement. Suk is an interesting guy with a unique background in ASIC, Semiconductor, EDA, and now Foundry. In baseball terms that would be like playing infield, outfield, home plate, and umpire!
Around the turn of the millennium Suk actually… Read More
PDK Generation Needs Paradigm Shift
For any semiconductor technology node to be adopted in actual semiconductor designs, the very first step is to have a Process Design Kit (PDK) developed for that particular technology node and qualified through several design tools used in the design flow. The development of PDK has not been easy; it’s a tedious, time consuming,… Read More
From Medical and Wearables to Big Data, in 日本語/한국어/中文
Whether it’s a tiny always-on medical device or a secure cloud network processing Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing new challenges to IC design. Almost by definition an IoT device contains a microcontroller of some sort along with some way of communicating. Unlike our smartphones where we are reasonably happy … Read More
US is the Ultimate Leader in Semiconductor Business
Last year in November when I looked at the world’s top20 semiconductor companies with Samsungand TSMCbeing at the second and third rank respectively, first being Intel, I computed the sales numbers of the companies based on their countries and found that Taiwan and South Korea accounted for 34.5% of the total sales of the top20 … Read More
Intel to Buy Altera?
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
2015, the Year of the Sheep…And the 16nm FPGA
If you live in California anyway, with its large Asian population, you can’t have helped noticing that it was the Lunar New Year a couple of weeks ago, the start of the year of the sheep. A couple of days after the New Year, Xilinx announced their new families of what they now call FPGAs, 3D ICs and MPSoCs. But which the rest of us … Read More
Semiconductor in China: Is 3rd Time a Charm?
China has recently announced extremely ambitious plans for becoming more self-sufficient in semiconductors. Today China is about 1/3 of the worldwide IC market but about 90% of that is imported. Think of something like the iPhone assembled in Shenzen with chips from TSMC, Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba/Sandisk , Micron and more (Taiwan,… Read More